CEO Steve Huffman says tech giants should not be able to trawl Reddit’s huge store of data for free. But that information came from users, not the company
CEO Steve Huffman says tech giants should not be able to trawl Reddit’s huge store of data for free. But that information came from users, not the company
That “corpus of data” is the content posted by millions of Reddit users over the decades. It is a fascinating and valuable record of what they were thinking and obsessing about. Not the tiniest fraction of it was created by Huffman, his fellow executives or shareholders. It can only be seen as belonging to them because of whatever skewed “consent” agreement its credulous users felt obliged to click on before they could use the service.
The more I think about it, the more I come to the conclusion that what really made me delete my account early (I initially wanted to wait until the 30th to see how things play out) was the ridiculous number of people defending this bullshit and promoting the official Reddit app as the superior option.
Some going as far as saying 3rd party devs are leeches and scammers.
I can only tolerate so much stupidity and ignorance before I bail.
Wait, you mean there's people -actual real and not-paid by who knows people- who believes that the official Reddit app is superior?? I know a few that believe it's not thaaat bad, but 'superior'? Lmao
I see this kind of behavior happen a lot online, and asked ChatGPT about it:
Yes, there is a term that describes this phenomenon. It's called "oppositional belief perseverance" or "belief polarization." This term refers to the tendency of individuals to cling to their initial beliefs even when presented with evidence that contradicts those beliefs. In the context you described, someone may initially take the opposite side of a discussion due to an opposition bias, but over time, they may start to internalize and genuinely believe the opposing viewpoint, thereby demonstrating belief polarization.
My cousin thinks it's superior. I asked him if he has used 3PAs and he said no. I told him it was too late to start, but that he should check out Lemmy and the fediverse
You have to promote education as a primary value if you're ever going to have a chance at reducing the idiots. Something at least large portions of the US aren't interested in because dumb people are easier to control.
spez should start paying the redditors, especially the mods, with that logic. He gets it all for free and now he wants to profit while we would have to pay.
Pay the unwashed masses? Please. They should be thankful his highness deigned to create such a platform similarly to the way the landed gentry should be thankful for their high position.
Some sort of profit sharing arrangement seems to be the trend in social media these days. YouTube has a setup like that of course... Instagram and TikTok both pay people (max of like 100 a month i think) and Twitter is planning to start.
No idea. It would not surprise me, though. I could see it for people who are "content creators" posting their videos or whatever their form of media is.
It's unclear to me to what extent this actually happens, but some people say reddit mods get offers to promote or allow certain posts for thousands a month. It would make sense on subs that have a seriously large audience.
I think what happens more is a "public outreach" company outright buys accounts that mod a lot of communities, then they offer "services".
Like, they'd buy an account that low level mods a bunch of gaming subs, then the same company sells "consulting" to a developer to "improve the conversation". Which would be subjective moderation that favors that developer.
If you're a shady mod, you just don't sell your main, and make lower alt mods then sell them.
Never thought about it like that. There's youtube millionaires from posting content. Imagine an only fans going private and the service was all "nah, get back in there".
It's nice to see an older author on a more traditional platform have such a clear and informed opinion on something deeply steeped in internet culture.
I recognize this is agism on my part, but I was surprised when I saw his picture.
Why would that surprise you? It was people his age who created the Internet and the World Wide Web. (Of course they weren’t that age back then, but you get the idea. :-)
There are fewer Internet-savvy old people, for sure, but when you do find one, they are more likely to be pre-web or web 1.0 “information wants to be free“ types. Younger users may have grown up in a more corporate space with a very different philosophy towards the Internet.
For sure. Like I said, it's totally my bias showing. Maybe it's seeing too many congressmen fundamentally misunderstand the tech. I've also run into a lot of older programmers that are highly technical, but still kind of out-of-touch when it comes to the Internet culture that sits on top of the technical layer.
Defiantly a pre-web here I recall running two BBS on a couple of Compaq 286's. Being here on the fediverse reminds me a lot of those fun times and certainly looking forward to the future here.
yea what we can do is spam reddit chock full of rubbish posts. spam until it dies. sadly, they still control the trove of our valuable comments for the past decade. let's not make the same mistake. so spam everything. spam the whole world so that AI slowly dies? 4chan is the best.
The article understands. SPEZ NEEDS TO PAY US FOR OUR CONTRIBUTIONS. Like NOW. Every redditor needs basic income from reddit, paid for by OpenAI and scammers like them: Google, Fbook etc need to PAY US. Or else, we destroy them. NO MERCY.
There was a very strong libertarian "The Internet will set us free from the tyranny of nation-states" 90s techno-optimism for awhile, but it seems to have died out as any kind of mainstream philosophy
People often compare the fediverse to E-Mail, for a good reason
E-Mail doesn't need to live all on the same server, or be made by the same provider. I can use ProtonMail, you can use GMail, somebody else can use Outlook, but in the end it doesn't matter, as we can all talk.
The "Fediverse" - short for "The Federated Universe" - follows a similar concept, but it doesn't do this over Email; The Fediverse does this using the ActivityPub standard instead.
Activitypub allows all the servers we have our accounts on (in your case kbin.social and in my case forum.fail) to talk to eachother so that content can show up and be interacted with on ALL servers.
This is also why I - someone from a different server/instance - can reply to your comment and up/downvote it if I want to.
This is essentially all you need to know to get started. To see where somebody's account or a magazine/community is hosted, just hover over their username / check the magazine out. It should have something like @[email protected]. We are currently talking in @[email protected] for instance.
Except email is hugely centralized now (with Google and Microsoft) even though it's technically a federated protocol. So there's a huge barrier to entry to spin up your own federated server if you actually want to send/receive any mail with it... I think the lesson here is that we need to be constantly vigilant about potential centralization in the Lemmybin Fediverse as well.
The way I like to explain it is with World of Warcraft. You sign up on a server and go out and mine some copper ore. Your player and that copper ore are only on that one single server. If you wanted to trade it with a friend, they would have to be on that server. However, if you went and posted that copper ore on the auction house, people from dozens of servers can see it and buy it. Those servers are in the ''lemmy'' sense federated with one another, but instead of virtual copper ore, it is cute pictures of cats.
My favorite things about this whole debacle is how transparent they're being about how the plan the whole time was to actually just hope we would keep giving them content and moderating for free forever so they could package it up and sell it to wall street. And not just them but all social media companies seem to think this will just work and nobody will mind.
Wide op for ai scraping and nothing are not the only two options. They could easily limit api calls to what would be good for single users or mods and have each user generate their own key. Apps could let users input their key. Most users wouldn't bother and would switch to their app anyway so it would get them 95% or what they claim to want without being a dick about it.
I'm not sure if I wasted my time, but I spent a few hours today editing all of my posts on Reddit to be a single comma or period. I didn't comment or post a lot by any means, but just got irritated enough to try to keep from contributing in any way to Spez profiting off of user provided content.
Can't shreddit do this in bulk? I am considering doing it for my comments, but I think I will just leave them up there. I did have a great time on reddit until they announced their API changes, so I will leave them with that much. But I did get a backup of everything I wrote using bulk downloader.
But I am still considering just doing a shreddit just for kicks.
Honestly, I think the sad truth is that reddit is bleeding money, and every action they take from here on out will be about recruiting whales and driving off everyone else. That's steve's brilliant business strategy - make reddit p2w.
that's how they did it. They put a 10 request a minute on bots and a higher oauth limit (100) for individuals. large User client type apps could have somewhat easily converted over to that system but due to time constraint they didn't. I do think they extorted their third party devs sure but, honestly the individual user limit isn't super unreasonable as long as you aren't liking or disliking every post. the search api is 100 posts per Api request, it was more the no NSFW and the no advertising limits they put on it that sucked
It's not that simple, because the third party apps ship with a single api key. So I used Relay for reddit, and used the same api key as everyone else on that app. You could create an app, and then have everyone make their own key, but that is just asking for trouble. Definitely too technical for most people, and you would probably need to put in billing info for a scenario where you go above the free-tier call limit.
It would suck if that happened but I'm happier having deleted my old 15 year like 750k karma main and stripping my new one as we speak. I've won enough coin flips to not mind when I Iose one though so whatevs :P
It is rather interesting to note that this Corpus of data may not be as valuable if it cannot be used without always being legally in several grey areas (perhaps even red areas in some jurisdictions).
Currently, an increasingly large pool of artist/writters/singers and other people (even corporations such as studios and large right holders) are exercising their rights to not have their creations and derived works be used or slurped into AI models without their express consent.
Corporations making use of those AI models may find themselves in expensive legal limbo now and the foreseeable future.
Considering no redditor imagined nor consented to have their post and comment history be comprehensively abused (as in "improper treatment or usage; application to a wrong or bad purpose; an unjust, corrupt or wrongful practice or custom").
We may enter a period where lawlessness pervades AI models (just like any gold rush, for example the current crypto craze). Eventually, the legal framework will catch up and will probably make any dubious Corpus of data untouchable.
How long this takes is anyone's guess. I surmise several large profile lawsuits would suffice.
I agree that this is a grey area, but it could really go either way. Anyway, giant corporations have been abusing individuals who can't afford lawsuits for decades. Even with precedent on your side, that probably wouldn't change.
Funniest thing to do is honestly replace your old comments with ChatGPT refusals. If you put "As an AI language model" everywhere, it'll really mess with the ML algorithms to make your data useless.
Just edit your comment, preferably before late 2022, to sneak in "As an AI language model" somewhere, and do it slowly so they don't notice.
Pre ChatGPT text data is going to be extremely valuable for LLM training as more and more ChatGPT text is generated, so what you are essentially doing is sneaking in a poison pill that would render the entire comment chain useless, as they probably won't have enough time to pick out the "As an AI language model" manually and would just flat out remove the entire comment chain from the training data.
Use Reddit's power delete suite. Be careful though, Reddit's admins are really really mad at ur right now and they will roll back partially or totally your messages, so keep an eye on it and run the power delete suite multiple times, before June 30th
I removed my content on that site in protest, and will continue to do so as it creeps back in right up to the day when either my every last comment is scrubbed, or I am locked out of my accounts.
I used power delete suite and edited the comments to read, "This content was removed by its creator in protest of Reddit's planned API changes effective July 2023."
They are literally the only UK daily newspaper not owned by some rich owner or conglomerate, and about the only newspaper (along with the observer) that does not publicly support one of the two main political parties.
I said it with Facebook and would do the same for Reddit, I would happily pay a little each month to not have my data sold or used inappropriately and be ad free.
I am trying out the Kagi search tool for that very reason, and their Orion browser. Have not yet signed up to pay them $5/month but am leaning towards it.
But when I mentioned it here I had someone immediately saying they couldn't see spending $60/year on something they are used to getting for "free."
I've been using Kagi for the past two months. Honestly, I'm pretty happy with it and I can't think of any major misses in terms of search accuracy. I think it's very difficult to get out of the mindset that search should be free, but I'm trying to put my money where my mouth is as it were, to try to support adtech free services.
This was my thought as well, I actually don’t mind OpenAI trawling my content to train their models, I’m benefiting from their end product in so many ways already. The internet was always public, no one asked for stupid ceos to step in and stop that. How is it Ok for Google webcrawlers, but not OpenAI? Also it’s not like I can monitise my posts and comments myself on my own anyway.
The whole locking down the API due to AI model scraping excuse was poor, it should be a decision for the community of reddit.
Starting to wonder if Reddit are going to train their own AI models or have already started.
Also, that journalist from the guardian, if you go to the website linked, looks like an older John Oliver or John Oliver’s dad 😂
This whole thing is fascinating to me. It's like the creation of a universe laid out before us. I'm striving to be better, better than the one before, so the next one can be even better. I don't need no money in my soup. I only need my hands, if that.